2720
2023 · 25m · Portugal
Directed by Basil da Cunha
Genres: comedy, documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, whimsical
A single-take immersion in Lisbon's Reboleira neighbourhood follows a girl searching for her missing brother after a police raid, crossing paths with an ex-convict late for his first day of work.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A single-take gimmick could've been insufferable restraint, but da Cunha uses it to collapse the usual documentary-drama hierarchy—you're not watching *about* Reboleira, you're *in* it, which feels like a subversive middle finger to the anthropological eye.
The formal rigor of the one-take frames this as contemporary kinetic realism in conversation with Bela Tarr and the Dardenne brothers, though the tonal blend of whimsy and noir keeps it from settling into their mournfulness—a deliberate tonal complexity that resists easy categorization.
The genius is the single-take constraint forcing every beat—a glance, a street corner pivot, a missed connection—to do double duty as both narrative and pure observation, so the camera's refusal to cut becomes the emotional architecture itself.